Hello World!

Well the unthinkable has happened. APS has entered the blogosphere. After over a decade in web development and the crushing pressure from peers and colleagues “we’ve” decided to contribute the insights, successes, tidbits of knowledge and trials and tribulations of running a small web firm in Chicago. By “we’ve” I mean most of the responsibility will fall on the sole proprietor (Mr. Abbott) (until APS can afford a social media minion full time!). Social media isn’t unlike most other human socialization – it’s most successful for those who have the personality and acumen for it. I’ve always been an introvert with a one track mind that likes to focus on complex problems – hence the career in programming. Despite this crippling handicap I’ve decided to take a lot of the advice I’ve been giving clients and take an active role in marketing. We’ve actually had some outstanding success in this area for our clients so it’s time to practice what we preach.

I just rebooted the website design for the third time in 2 years and chose WordPress as the blogging platform of choice. All content management systems are evil in there own way but I’m navigating my way around pretty well for being a Microsoft .Net lackey for most of my career. I’ve managed to hack up this template pretty good for never coding in PHP until this weekend. It reminds me a lot of classic MS active server pages actually. I think I’m a bit of a rare bird as you won’t find many developers who are well versed with Microsoft, work on a Mac, and has some Ruby on Rails contract work under his belt. Anyways I got everything up an running and most of my content transferred in a day of work over the weekend. Not bad.

I’m am looking forward to sharing experiences and ideas and bring my patented brand of shy, awkward and anti social online. God knows I have some kind of record for using information and code samples from every blog on the internet without contributing anything. So here is to turning that around and starting anew.